leave unsaid unspoken
by irishais
Summary: Loyalty is a dangerous thing. Fujin/Seifer, before, during, after.


**leave unsaid unspoken**

 ** _-irishais-_**

i.

Fujin meets Seifer when she is seven, and he is nine.

Actually, it is _him_ that runs into _her,_ literally, nearly taking her out on a mad dash through the hall, quick reflexes even as a cadet catching her before he can knock her down completely. Seifer tosses a, "Sorry!" over his shoulder.

She trips the guy chasing him, sticking out her small foot still in its patent-leather buckled shoe, the nicest clothes she owns for the day her parents give her away to Garden, picks up the knife the kid has been carrying, and slips it in the pocket of her sweater.

They take her to the cafeteria for lunch, a brightly-lit, shiny-clean place full of students in uniforms and their own clothes (she learns, later, that she won't have to wear the uniform on a daily basis as long as her own clothes don't violate Garden's dress code). She gets a tray of food, fries and foil-wrapped hot dog and a can of soda, and picks a table next to the tall blond boy with the eyes like green seaglass.

The cadet assigned to show her around doesn't notice her slipping him the pocketknife, too focused on her own lunch to care much about what a seven-year-old kid does.

This is her introduction to Garden.

ii.

Raijin joins them when she is eight, a Centran wanderer picked up by the police for shoplifting, a ward of the state by judge's decree. Garden sees a boy who has potential, even if he doesn't show much fondness for proper dress, or speaking a language that isn't one of the old tongues.

Fujin and Seifer are painstaking in teaching him, picking up where Garden's immersion program fails, beating up anyone who makes fun of him. They are a posse. It's a word Rai picks up from an old spaghetti cowboy movie on late-night TV, and becomes enamored with. _Posse_.

It suits them all. They dress up like gunslingers for the All Hallows Eve party in town that fall, and Seifer wins a stuffed dog in a stupid pirate costume at one of the festival games that he presents to her with a flourish.

Fujin doesn't admit that she keeps it close at hand every night from then on.

iii.

She is fifteen. Three months shy of it, actually, during what should _be_ routine, just some training in the forest with Raijin and Seifer, and she wakes up instead in the infirmary with half the world blacked out and Seifer begging forgiveness.

A swing gone wild, the tip of his gunblade catching her across her face. Her life irrevocably changed.

Garden wants to throw her out. She's useless to them now, down one eye when depth perception is vital to a SeeD's survival.

She extracts her apology from Seifer in fourteen hours spent in a disused room in the basement over the weekend, an ancient practice dummy dug up from who knows where and set at the far end. Fujin throws knife after knife, wide shot after wide shot getting narrower and narrower, until she can hit it dead-center of its unmarked face almost every time.

Garden makes a note in her file, and threatens her with expulsion, or worse, a desk job, if she endangers any of the other cadets on her SeeD exam.

Fujin passes on the first try. Seifer fails. Raijin is three classes shy of being able to take it all.

iv.

Seifer gets drunk at her graduation ball, a flask tucked into his uniform pocket providing untold liquid courage, because Quistis Trepe is also in her graduating class, and Fujin has seen how he looks at her.

Fujin is wearing a new dress, bought with her very first Garden paycheck, simple and black and boring, the only dress she owns that isn't her uniform, and when Seifer tells her that she looks pretty, Fujin steals his flask from his hand, pulls a deep draught, and kisses him instead.

Liquid courage.

They are a posse, and he shouldn't give a shit about Quistis Trepe in her pretty blue gown and her angel-blonde hair.

She is a virgin, but Seifer doesn't care, or doesn't notice. It is painful, his breath smells like cheap whiskey, and his hands are too rough on her skin, but his mouth against hers is sweet, and her name tastes like honey when he whispers it.

The stuffed dog toy is squashed beneath her shoulders when she breaks from the sensation of _everything_ , and his eyepatch is crooked when she thinks to extract him from beneath the pillows later.

Seifer doesn't stay the night, because Garden takes its curfew very seriously, even on a party night. He leaves her stark, dark bedroom like a ghost, but brings her coffee and a donut the next morning, nicked from the Instructors' lounge.

She aches, but lets him through the door anyway.

The posse changes.

v.

In June, he meets a girl.

A real girl, with flowing dark hair and a smile that means something, and just like that, Fujin is aware of her own flat existence, her don't-fuck-with-me attitude, her clothes that skew genderless rather than this girl's pretty sundress.

Fujin watches Seifer light up like the sun, and when he thinks to turn, to introduce them, Fujin has melted back into the crowd at the street fair, and bought a train ticket for home.

She gives up. She concedes.

The posse changes.

Seifer comes back to her two months later, a summer romance in the rearview mirror once the new semester starts, two AM at her door with a bag still slung over his shoulder. He has a pizza, and a scratchy pale beard along his jaw.

She lets him in, she lets him in, disheveled and blinking in the bright fluorescence of the hall lights, darkness on one side, Seifer on the other.

Pizza, and the abridged _Sorceress' Knight_ playing on the late-late channel.

Fujin thinks now that maybe it would have been better if she had slammed the door in his face.

vi.

The war comes a year later, and they chase him, chase the sorceress Ultimecia who has taken their friend, their leader, heedless of Garden's instructions, heedless of anything but rescuing him, Seifer, who always threw himself headfirst into everything.

Ultimecia tolerates them like errant puppies, ones she molds and manipulates into guard dogs- and Fujin _lets_ her, lets her invade her brain like she's done to Seifer, sink in her claws, because if it means not losing _him_ , she will do _anything_.

It nearly kills her in the end, when Seifer is the one who tells them he doesn't need them anymore, when she begs and pleads and her voice breaks, and still he pushes them away.

The posse shatters.

vii.

The war ends.

She weeps in the privacy of her own room (Garden has given her, graciously, until the end of the week to find new living arrangements, and has deposited her severance in her account.) The crying jag lasts for an hour, until she can't do it anymore, and is left hollow, wrung out, sick to her stomach.

Raijin gets back from his interrogation, and helps her pack.

The war is ended.

They pick up Seifer somewhere in Timber, bursting out of the forest like a wild animal at about the same time Fujin is paying, in cash, the first and last month's rent on an apartment by the water in Dollet. Garden's severance is generous, moreso than it really should be for someone who essentially went AWOL, and she thinks Squall might have something to do with it.

The war is over, and Seifer Almasy is released into Balamb Garden's custody with the conditions that he is tracked at all times, that he attends mandated therapy three times a week, that he performs five hundred hours of community service, and that under no circumstances is he allowed near a weapon, a Guardian Force, or a Garden uniform ever again.

He's crazy, and so they let him go, brain fried like eggs.

Fujin obeys the instructions of a brief text from Leonhart, and picks Seifer up at the train station. He looks terrible, and his skin is too clammy for the sunny day. She hugs him anyway, wraps her arms around his thinned-down frame and buries her face in his chest, and he freezes like a startled deer at the contact.

They have to be careful about doors slamming too hard, about the beer in the fridge being too accessible, about the steak knives in the kitchen drawer.

They have to be so careful, and Fujin is the only one he lets touch him, for the longest time, her fingers rebandaging knuckles from those times he punches brick walls and strangers' faces, just to feel something again, her cheek leaning into his palm when he traces the edge of her eyepatch with a trembling hand, _I'm so sorry_ , spilling from his mouth like broken glass.

He has nothing to apologize for, and everything.

viii.

The posse rebuilds. It takes time, years, Seifer's hand tight in hers at night, his breath warm against her cheek, Raijin's snores heard from down the hall. They are there when he cries out, when he shatters again and again and again.

She is twenty, when she thinks they might make it, when everything might just be _alright_.

The posse remains together, steadfast to the end.

After all, that's what it means to be loyal.


End file.
